As the People’s Republic of China continues to pursue baseless claims to large swaths of the South China Sea and to try to intimidate coastal states like the Philippines, many nations have reached out to the United States Coast Guard for support, said U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Area Deputy Commander Rear Admiral Andrew Sugimoto.
“And we look forward to working with each and every one of them. We have shifted some resources to the Pacific, specifically in order to be able to meet those commitments. We are deploying a ship called our Indo-Pacific support cutter, which is out there going around the Pacific Island nations providing training and assistance. ... We’ve had two ships this past year that have been out there conducting exercises with all of our partners – Korea, Japan, the Philippines – and just recently the Coast Guard Cutter Waeshe came back from a very successful patrol in the Western Pacific.”
Over the past year, the Coast Guards of the United States, Japan, and the Philippines have engaged in trilateral exercises.
“Working together recently, we conducted search-and-rescue operations or search-and rescue exercises,” said Rear Admiral Sugimoto. “It really isn’t about one nation trying to push its points, but it is an example of us all coming together to uphold [that] rules-based order that we find so important in our ability to conduct commerce, to feed our citizens, to safely protect them on the waters, to protect the environment – all of those things. And those rules are the basis on which we can coexist peacefully and do those things.”
“The ocean,” said Rear Admiral Sugimoto “is an incredible part of our lives.”
“We are all connected on the ocean. Fish know no boundaries. Pollution doesn’t know any boundaries. Our fellow human beings in trouble don’t care who is there to help each other. And we need to continue to work together collectively as a globe to continue to reinforce those rules on which we count on,” he said.
“We need to be able to send ships freely wherever the oceans are,” said Rear Admiral Sugimoto, “as that is part of the right of every nation on the planet.”
